Book Five, Chapter 70: Caged Wolves
"I don't know why he brought me," I said as we walked down the stairs into the basement. "The only thing I can shoot those wolves with is my camera."
It may have been the wrong time for a joke, but I wanted to establish that my character was not prone to becoming emotional or losing his cool. That was an important part of setting up Oblivious Bystander, among other things.
Like everything else, the stairs and the basement were lit with lanterns, and as we went down, I started to smell the people we were about to meet. They smelled like wet dog.
Before long, we followed the corridor to a large clearing that appeared to have been hollowed out of pure rock, more like a cave system than a basement. In the center of that clearing were two cages of thick iron bars, about the size of jail cells.
Two people—a man and a woman wearing hospital scrubs with claw marks cut through them—were in those cages.
When they looked over at us, they were shocked to see us—or, to be more exact, they were shocked to see Andrew and Michael.
Something I hadn't anticipated had happened.
As I looked at them on the red wallpaper, I noticed that the tall blonde man and the short, redheaded woman were Logan and Avery—not NPCs acting as surrogates, but the actual players. Their plot armor was set to 0, and they had no tropes equipped, but it definitely appeared to be them.
Logan was probably in his late twenties or early thirties. Even in his pitiful state, he had knowing, clever eyes. Avery might have been my age. She was scared witless.